This invention relates to an electronic musical instrument which makes it possible to preset the tone colors of selected ones of numerous musical instruments.
As a player becomes more skilled in performance, the player generally desires to express his feeling by varying, for example, tone volume, tone quality, and tone color. To meet this requirement, an electronic musical instrument such as an electronic organ is widely accepted which can freely produce numerous tone colors. One known type of electronic musical instrument capable of changing tone colors into desired ones carries out said operation by a proper combination of draw bars or tablets. The presetting of tone colors generally involves complicated operations and substantially fails to be quickly carried out during performance. Even where said presetting is effected, it is only possible to preset long tones having a considerable duration. Further, an electronic musical instrument which is provided with a plurality of stop switches can indeed preset a tone color by a single operation during performance. However, this type of electronic musical instrument has the drawbacks that as tone colors to be preset increase in number, a larger number of stop switches have to be provided, resulting in the complicated arrangement of said stop switches and inconvenience in the selection of tone colors. Another known type of electronic musical instrument is provided with not only ordinary tone color-presetting switches, but also a board in which desired tone colors are previously preset in order to effect the change of tone color during performance. Such type of instrument tends to have a complicated construction and an enlarged size. Moreover, it is undesirable from the standpoint of operation efficiency and cost to mount similar tone color-presetting switches on said board. As described above, the prior art electronic organ, for example, can indeed change tone colors during performance, but is still accompanied with the above-mentioned drawbacks. To date, there has not been developed any compact electronic musical instrument which can freely change tone color during performance by a simple mechanism.
Hitherto, an electronic musical instrument of simple arrangement has also been developed which can easily vary tone colors during performance. This type of electronic musical instrument comprises an M number of memory devices which can store the tone colors of an M number of musical instruments selected from an N number of musical instruments (N&gt;M&gt;1). Before performance, a player presets the tone colors of desired musical instruments in said M number of memory devices. At the time of performance, tone color data are read out of said memory devices to carry out a performance with desired tone colors. However, once the M number of memory devices are shut off from a power source, data stored therein are extinguished. Where, therefore, it is desired to produce tone colors of other desired musical instruments, the M number of memory devices have to be supplied again with tone color data, thus complicating the tone color-presetting operation. Further, it is necessary to write tone color data an M number of times in the M number of memory devices, thus causing the writing of tone color data to consume a great deal of time and work.